Me And The Boy In The Plastic Bubble. Reunited And It Feels So Good…

In all the time I lived with my folks I only remember them renting maybe 5 videotapes from the store. If memory serves they were, The Onion Field with James Woods, Alien with Sigourney Weaver, Mississippi Burning and The Nuclear War TV Movie, The Day After, which I thought and still think was super weird.

I remember watching The Day After on TV when it aired and vividly recall the horror we felt from viewing what seemed to be our certain future, a nuclear war, and I have no idea why they wanted to watch it again? Just in case maybe? I don’t know..

So finally we get to the fifth tape, the one tape that they rented more than once, the champion of all VHS Home Rentals for us, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble with John Travolta.

My mom was a HUGE! Travolta fan. Still is really. She liked it when he danced. Who doesn’t though? You’d be crazy not to. The thing is, as far as I can tell he never dances in this one, he just gets sick and then gets encased inside of a bubble. I don’t know what the appeal was. They dug it though.

I rented the same tapes over and over again, Hardware Wars, Animalympics, Grunt The Wrestling Movie, etc.. This though is the only time I can recall them renting the same movie more than once. I mean, they only rented like 5 movies ever so it was a bit weird to have the same flick keep popping up at the house. I still think it’s weird. It’s not like it’s an awesome film. It’s currently at 49% over at Rotten Tomatoes. Not a classic by any stretch.

So the other day I was over at The Dig AKA The Goodwill Outlet Store, my most favorite haunt for VHS tapes when there it was, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble in it’s big black Clam Shell Case!

and when I grabbed it I saw something that totally blew my mind, a tag from Home Video Plus…The very same shop that we rented tapes from! It’s all together possible that this is the very same tape that we used to rent!

Back in the day VHS tapes were CRAZY EXPENSIVE like 75 to 100 dollars or more so stores of that era had a real low copy depth. For a non-blockbuster movie like The Boy In The Plastic Bubble it’s possible that they might only have one copy. With all that said there is a very good chance that this is the very same tape we rented! How weird is that?

Anyway, that’s about all there is to the story. It’s just weird to me that after all these years I’m reunited with a piece of my past, a VHS tape even, one of my favorite things in the world. It’s cool but it could have been cooler if it was a copy of Animalympics or Grunt The Wrestling movie but that’d be a Christmas level miracle and it’s only the beginning of June…

Make sure to check out my podcast, The Toys R Us Report every Wednesday at IseeRobots.com. It’s a half hour of Pop-Culture talk that’s out of this world!